#503: Aim For Perfection But Don't Expect It

Like me, have you ever bowled in an organized league? If so, you learned a valuable lesson you can successfully apply to your weight loss.

Huh? Really? And what would that be?

Just this: The odds of you bowling a perfect 300 game (all strikes) is astronomical . So you likely settled for doing the best you could every game.

There was still hope that perfection would happen but you did not give up if you failed to bowl a 300 game, did you?

How about applying that thinking to your weight loss efforts?

Here's how: Set a goal of five or six positive days a week where you stay within your calorie range and get at least 10 minutes of exercise. If you end the week with seven positive days, that's , but realize you still will have had a successful week even if you were not perfect one or two days.

Like in school when we did not need to score 100 on a test to get an "A." Often, 90 percent was good enough. Perfection was not expected but we still tried our best on every exam, didn't we?

Once you have established the five to six positive days as routine, then set your goal for six positive days of calorie consumption and 10 minutes or more of exercise every week.

As a visual reinforcement, get a calendar and boxes of those gold and silver stars teachers gave out in elementary school. At the end of every successful day stick a silver star on the calendar with a gold star at the end of every positive week.

This plan allows for the inevitable slip ups we all will have yet still allows for success. Just be sure that you don't look at the one or two off days as an excuse to plot thousands of excess calories on your tracker. But if you have that ice cream cone or piece of cake one day and go over your maximum calories, so be it, you had a day or two of imperfection built into your plan.

Just as bowlers hope to get a strike with every shot , baseball players hope to get a base hit every time at bat and basketball players hope to make every shot , so, too, should we work to have good days every day during our weight loss journey.

The reality is, though, that we should aim for perfection but not expect it. Five or six positive days every week with any off days being within reason will consistently move us forward in our efforts to lose weight.

So, yes, aim for perfection but don't expect it. Stick to the weekly plan above and soon you will fill your calendar with gold stars.